K Is for Killer

apartment. As usual, Rosie had bullied me into ordering according to her dictates. It's a phenomenon I don't seriously complain about. Beyond McDonald's Quarter Pounders with Cheese, I don't have strong food preferences, and I'm just as happy to have someone else steer me through the menu. Tonight she recommended the caraway seed soup with dumplings, followed by a braised pork dish, yet another Hungarian recipe involving meatstuffs overwhelmed by sour cream and paprika. Rosie's is not so much a restaurant as it is a funky neighborhood bar where exotic dishes are whipped up according to her whims. The place always feels as though it's on the verge of being raided by the food police, so narrowly does it skirt most public health regulations. The scent in the air is a blend of Hungarian spices, beer, and cigarette smoke. The tables in the center of the room are those chrome-and-Formica dinette sets left over from the 1940s. Booths hug the walls: stiff, high-backed pews sawed out of construction-grade plywood, stained dark brown to disguise all the knotholes and splinters.
    It was not quite seven, and none of the habitual sports enthusiasts were in evidence. Most nights, especially in the summer months, the place is filled with noisy teams of bowlers and softball players in company uniforms. In winter, they're forced to improvise. Just this week a group of revelers had invented a game called Toss the Jockstrap, and a hapless example of this support garment was now snagged on the spike of a dusty marlin above the bar. Rosie, who is otherwise quite bossy and humorless, seemed to find this amusing and left it where it was. Apparently her impending nuptials had lowered her IQ several critical points. She was currently perched up on a bar stool, scanning the local papers while she smoked a cigarette. A small color television set was blaring at one end of the bar, but neither of us was paying much attention to the broadcast. Rosie's beloved William, Henry's older brother, had flown to Michigan with him. Rosie and William were getting married in a month, though the date seemed to drift.
    The telephone rang from its place on the near end of the bar. Rosie glanced over at it with annoyance, and at first I thought she wouldn't answer it at all. She took her time about it, refolding the paper before she set it aside. She finally answered on the sixth ring, and after she'd exchanged a few brief remarks with the caller, her gaze jumped to mine. She held the receiver in my direction and then clunked it down on the bar top, probably devastating someone's eardrum.
    I pushed my dinner plate aside and eased out of the booth, careful that I didn't snag a splinter in the back of my thigh. One day I'm going to rent a belt sander and give all the wooden seats a thorough scouring. I'm tired of worrying about the possibility of impaling myself on spears of cheap plywood. Rosie had moved to the far end of the bar, where she turned down the volume on the TV set. I crossed to the bar and picked up the receiver. "Hello?"
    "Hey, Kinsey. Cheney Phillips. How are you?"
    "How'd you know where I was?"
    "I talked to Jonah Robb, and he told me you used to hang out at Rosie's. I tried your home number and your machine picked up, so I figured you might be having dinner."
    "Good detective work," I said. I didn't even want to ask what had made him think to discuss me with Jonah Robb, who was working the Missing Persons detail at the Santa Teresa Police Department when I'd met him three years before. I'd had a brief affair with him during one of his wife's periodic episodes of spousal abandonment. Jonah and his wife, Camilla, had been together since seventh grade. She left him at intervals, but he always took her back again. It was love junior high school style, which became very tedious for those on the periphery. I hadn't known what the game was, and I didn't understand the role I'd been tagged to play. Once I got the message, I'd opted out of the situation, but it left me feeling bad. When you're single, you sometimes make those mistakes. Still, it's disconcerting to think your name is being bandied about. I didn't like the idea that I was the subject of conversation in the local police locker room.
    "What are you up to?" I said to Cheney.
    "Nothing much. I'll be going down to lower State Street later tonight, looking for a guy with some information I want. I thought you might like to ride along. An old girlfriend of Lorna's tends to hustle her butt in the